Making sense of Muse, the agentic model, and evaporating cash flow at META and GOOG

Meta has been spending a lot on the AI buildout. It generated over $40 billion in FCF TTM, but less than $2 billion in Q2 2026.

With Muse, since it is mostly agentic, it seems it will consume a lot more tokens than a simple LLM. That means it should come with a much higher variable cost than typical LLMs.

I have been trying Muse and it seems to do a comparable job to Claude on many agentic tasks that I want to do. It will work for many minutes on complex tasks that requires searching multiple sites and compiling results.

However Anthropic charges $100/month for Claude Max, and even then on some complex tasks I hit the token usage limit, say when I am searching across several websites.

Muse is being offered for free and it seems to go for very long times, and I have not hit a usage wall yet.

How is this possible? It seems like the token usage will be very large.

Zuckerberg has said he plans to take a cut of transactions done with Muse. But I am also seeing many people on social media questioning whether anyone trusts giving access to payments or email to Muse.

Personally, I do not feel comfortable giving access to those to Muse, at least currently.

And you need enough monetizable tasks to pay for all the non-monetizable tasks that Muse does.

Consumer trust is generally higher for Google over Facebook, and Google already has access to most people’s email and credit card numbers, so it seems like it would be easier for them to launch a successful agentic product. However Google’s free cash flow already turned negative in Q2 2026, and the launch of a pure agentic product would push that even further into the red.

All of these agentic products seem like they would drive a lot more token demand but all that token usage should continue to drive FCF at these firms lower.

I am still not sure of the right business model that justifies this large of a variable cost of usage. As these products expand into emerging markets, they will carry the same variable cost with lower incremental revenues. So it’s hard for me to see how you could offer a free product and try to take a cut of transactions.